Why they work

Looking at this list, a few features immediately jump out at me—I wonder if you found that, too?

Titles that quantify the post’s benefits work well: Facebook tactics that’ll triple your fans? 100,000 pageviews in one month? 19 Essential plugins? Win one of ten trips? Quantification of benefits is a theme among these titles. I know people say “list posts do well,” but I think the issue—at click—isn’t the list so much as the perceived payoff. And all of these post titles promise a big payoff, up-front. Of course, to be shared, the posts need to deliver on that payoff, and these ones obviously do.

Natural language speaks volumes: The title 3 Reasons No One Comes Back to Your Blog—And How to Fix It quantifies a benefit, but it also speaks in natural language. It’s a slight exaggeration—you’re probably not getting zero repeat visits to your blog—but it’s one that we’d use in conversation with our blogging friends: “Man, no one comes back to my blog!” The same goes for “tactics that’ll triple your fans.” Bloggers seem reticent to use contractions in titles, but they can work really well—especially in keeping the rhythm of the title swinging along. They also suggest that the post will be written in language that’s approachable and on the level.

Titles that speak to “you” have cut-through: Three of these titles refer directly to the reader: your blog, your fans. While you’ll want to mix your titles up a bit, bringing the message and the benefits home to your audience by speaking to them directly is a good way to pique readers’ interest. Using “you” and “your” can give titles personal relevance.

Unique ideas grab attention: We see titles about Facebook marketing and WordPress plugins all the time, and they’re basically essential reading. But some of the other titles in this list communicate unusual ideas, and get attention for that very reason. Get 100,000 pageviewss a month … using SlideShare? That’s going to make a few people stop and sit up. Similarly, systemizing writing is a bit of a foreign concept for many: just how do you systemize what’s seen as an unruly, unpredictable creative task? So topics are important to the success of these posts, too.

How we tweaked them

Finally, I wanted to show you how we’d altered these titles, so you can try similar tweaks on your own post titles.

19 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Blog: The only change I made here was to the ending. The post’s original title was “19 Essential WordPress Plugins for 2012″ but I thought the content would have more longevity without the time-limitation. I also like to use “your” in titles where I can, because I think it gives some titles more cut-through: “Essential plugins for my blog? Really? Alright, I’ll take a look.”

9 Facebook Marketing Tactics That’ll Triple Your Fans: This post was submitted with the title “9 Facebook Marketing Strategies to Triple Your Fans”. I changed “strategies” because, well, they weren’t strategies. I also wanted a stronger sense of causality between the tactics and the results, so I used “that’ll.” Altogether, these changes alliterated well and gave the title a strong natural rhythm, too.

3 Reasons No One Comes Back to Your Blog—And How to Fix It: This post was originally titled, “3 reasons no one comes back even after a huge spike in traffic”. The problem was length, and context. Comes back to where? When I see titles in my Twitter feed or RSS feed reader, keywords jump out. I wanted to get “blog” into this one. Also, since Alex had included “The fix?” headings for each of the reasons he’d identified in the post, the “—and how to fix it” part of the title basically wrote itself.

Attract 100,000 Pageviews in 1 Month Using SlideShare: This one was submitted with the title, “How to get 100,000 views in 1 month using Slideshare” but I wanted to get that big number closer to the start of the title. Also, we have a lot of “how to” posts on ProBlogger, so I try to vary them a bit so the blog doesn’t come across as one big how-to post. Finally, the full word “pageviews” seemed a bit more Google-responsive than “views.”

A Systematic Approach to Writing Successful Blog Posts: This post was submitted with the title “How to write a successful blog post,” but on reading it I saw that it presented a system for writing, and I’d just scheduled another post on systematized blogging. I thought this post would be a nice follow-up, so I scheduled it for the same day and gave it a title that tied it to the theme of systematized blogging. As I mentioned above, this title was a bit more of a head-turner, since the whole problem with creative tasks like writing is that they seem so slippery and difficult to manage.

How do you go about creating good titles for posts on your blog? Share your secrets with us in the comments.

Problogger.net runs on the Genesis Framework

The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. Genesis provides the secure and search-engine-optimized foundation that takes WordPress to places you never thought it could go.

a powerful title captures the reader’s attention and connects with their needs, i think the most important is the practical meaning, blog post is better than a pure article as it comes from real experience of author, the title should be related to how-to , live result to show tips,…

One thing I’m doing is analyzing my email and blog stats to see which emails get opened more and which posts are visited most and then taking what I find and incorporating it into my headlines for everything going forward. I’m finding list posts do cause interest as well as words and phrases like…free…how to…and anything that has to do with what I have learned.

The benefits of a good title are endless. I hope to use these tips to start optimizing the titles of by blog posts for success. I have personally been a big fan of list-style titles for a while. They make posts easy to format and give the reader a general idea as to the time they will have to invest reading and what is in it for them.

On the other hand, I have started ignoring most list style posts with a number much higher than 10. Seems that people have decided that the bigger the number the better. Unfortunately, they do not bother putting in the time. If you are going to go for a big number, do not just give readers a link-filled page with one liners. Take the time, craft the post and release top quality. While the title might lure them in, the content keeps them coming back for more.

Hi Leith,
Thanks for your feedback. As a professional editor as well as a professional writer, I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately as the only content editor for ProBlogger, I need to edit my own work—and I’m sure that with your wealth of experience, you know how difficult that can be.

I’d be sorry indeed if all you got from this piece was an opportunity to point out an error. We’d love to hear your thoughts on titling, too :)
Georgina

I could probably write a whole post on “poor spelling or sloppy syntax” — such a hot-button topic.

Leith, I love your focus on quality, Georgina, I totally understand “self-editing” (as a phase or a way of life :P)

Just a few cents here, on a topic I’m passionate about:

On my blog (ryzeonline.com) I aim to have my writing mirror my speaking voice closely, and use quite a bit of slang, as well as breaking many grammatical conventions.

Not only that, when I’m reading, I realize that there are quadrillions of words on the internet and for me to dismiss the value of certain sites based on a typo is ludicrous and probably not in my best interests.

The flipside of course, is personal quality standards, and then all of it is context sensitive. It’s likely a much different issue on CopyBlogger or ProBlogger than it is on The Hip-Hop Forums :D

I just finished reading a post by Harry French on negative posting. How appropriate.

I’m guilty of making negative comments in the previous couple of days because I am new to this form of communication and I’m trying to understand how and why it works.

I wasn’t downright rude and didn’t use any profanity, but I was intolerant of your feelings. I’m easily annoyed when I come across errors in spelling and syntax. However, I was thoughtless and a little pompous and I apologise.

I loved reading this to see the why. Then the ‘before’ and ‘after’ headlines really showed what an enormous difference a slight change can make.
I’m currently working on writing great headlines so this is very useful.
Brilliantly clever and explained in a really simple way. Bookmarked!

Thanks for including the rationale behind the tweaks. I have tried to be witty and use wordplays in the headlines to grab attention but have to admit that it doesn’t work at all. I’ll apply the tips here and the conventional list type of headlines for some time now and see what happens.

If you enjoyed this post, we have a two-parter coming up in July (21-22) about titling posts, and then delivering on those titles in the post text :) If you found this post useful, keep an eye out for those ones!